Making Technology More Accessible: OneNote, Project Torino and Copilot for Xbox One

As we continue to make our technology and services more accessible, we want to share a few recent highlights.

This week, Microsoft is making the Accessibility Checker available on OneNote for Windows 10 as part of a series of updates for Office 365. The Accessibility Checker, which is also available in other Office applications, helps you find and fix issues that might make your content difficult for people with visual impairments to consume.

Daily Edventures spotlighted the creators of Learning Tools for OneNote, highlighting how educators can use the immersive reader feature. Learning Tools is a great resource for teachers and students as well as people with learning differences, like dyslexia, or learning English as a second language.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced Project Torino, a physical programming language to make sure that kids who have visual impairments or other challenges, such as dyslexia and autism, can participate in coding classes along with all their classmates. A small group of students tested the Project Torino system and influenced the design with their suggestions for improvements. Microsoft researchers and designers from our lab in Cambridge, UK, created the project.

We are also working to make Xbox One gaming experiences more accessible for everyone and yesterday announced a few new features. For instance, our new Copilot feature allows two controllers to act as if they were one. This will help make Xbox One more inviting to gamers who can benefit from playing along with another person, more fun for families by adding cooperative controls for any game, and easier for players who need unique configurations to play.

At Microsoft, we work every day to make technology more accessible. Together we can help make sure technology leaves no one behind.

From left, Lexy Ryan, 13, and Theo Holroyd, 10, use Project Torino. The physical programming language is designed to be inclusive of children with visual impairments. Photo by Jonathan Banks.